Call for Proposals for ECPR General Conference, August 22-25, Hamburg

Christel Koop and David Levi-Faur are submitting the section *Changes and Challenges in Regulatory Governance* for the next ECPR General Conference, held in Hamburg, August 22-25 2018. They now invite panel proposals for this section. They are, for instance, interested in panel proposals in areas such as regulatory reform after the financial crisis, regulation in multilevel contexts, international and transnational regulation, regulatory agencies and networks, and the relationship between regulators and regulatees.

If you are interested in organizing a panel, please send a proposal with a title, the name of the panel chair (and optionally co-chair), and a short abstract (around 100 words) to e.ruffing@ipw.uni-hannover.de. The deadline for panel proposals is November 10, 2018.

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Description of the Call for Proposals:

This section brings together scholars who focus on changes and challenges in regulatory governance. Broadly speaking, regulatory governance refers to the use of binding rules – including standard-setting, monitoring and sanctioning – to intervene in the activities of specific categories of economic, political or social actors. Typically, we think of government intervention in economic activity, but regulatory governance may also refer to self-regulation by industry, regulation inside government, and regulation by international organisations, and national and transnational non-governmental organisations (see, e.g., Black 2001; Levi-Faur 2011; Koop and Lodge 2017).

The scope of regulatory governance has changed considerably over the past decades. While government regulation of economic sectors was not very extensive until the late 1970s, it quickly expanded in the 1980s and 1990s in response to privatisation, Europeanisation and the increased reliance on indirect or proxy government (Majone 1997). Moreover, regulation expanded at other levels, including the regulation of states and non-state actors by international organisations, regulation within the state, self-regulation by business, and civil society regulation of business and the state (e.g., Levi-Faur 2005).

This expansion of regulatory governance has posed a number of challenges. First, as the introduction and enforcement of rules is often the responsibility of actors who are not directly elected by the people, questions of democratic legitimacy, accountability and transparency have continuously been raised. Second, as regulatory responsibilities have dispersed – for instance, because of multi-level regulatory governance and the rise of independent regulatory agencies –, co-operation, co-ordination and control have become key issues (e.g., Bach et al. 2016; Busuioc 2016; Heims 2017; Mathieu et al. 2017; Ruffing 2017). Third, the expansion of the scope of business regulation has attracted renewed interest in the relationship between regulators and regulatees, including questions of co-regulation, lobbying, revolving doors and capture (e.g., Carpenter and Moss 2014; Arras and Braun 2017). Fourth, technological change has triggered new regulatory questions; not only about the regulation of high-tech corporations and new technologies, but also about the potential of technology to improve the regulatory process itself (e.g., Lodge and Wegrich 2014; Tzur 2017).

This section seeks to address major changes and challenges in regulatory governance, and invites panels and paper that centre on the following themes (not exhaustive):

* Research on multi-level and dispersed regulatory governance,
including the role and influence of transnational regulatory
networks, government control over non-governmental regulation, and
regulatory co-ordination;
* Research on the institutional design of regulatory bodies, including
the design of regulatory agencies and its implications for
democratic legitimacy, expertise and regulatory outcomes, and the
design of non-state regulators and its consequences;
* Research on innovation in regulatory enforcement, including the use
of technology in enforcement, and the role of randomised controlled
trials in assessing the link between enforcement tools and compliance;
* Research on the ideational dimension of regulation, including the
changes in ideas and narratives after the financial crisis and their
implications for the scope and nature of (financial market) regulation.

The section is also open to complete panels revolving around international research projects on aspects of regulatory governance.

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About Chris

Chris Brummer is Williams Research Professor and Faculty Director of Georgetown’s Institute of International Economic Law. Prior to joining Georgetown’s faculty with tenure in 2009, Brummer was an assistant professor of law at Vanderbilt Law School. He has also taught at several leading universities as a visiting professor including the universities of Basel, Heidelberg, and the London School of Economics. And he's written multiple books including Minilateralism.